3.11 Robotics, artificial intelligence and expert systems



IT Concepts that will be addressed


An input device is any piece of a computer hardware equipment or peripheral. They are used to control signals to a computer or any other information processing unit. Examples of input devices are cameras, sensors and microphones.

Camera

A camera is an input device that records images, these images consist of still photograph or moving images such as videos or movies. The term camera comes from the camera obscura (Latin for "dark chamber"), an early mechanism for projecting images. The modern camera evolved from the camera obscura.

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The camera obscura is an instrument consisting of a darkened chamber or box, into which light is admitted through a convex lens, forming an image of external objects on a surface of paper or glass, etc., placed at the focus of the lens

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A digital camera also digicam or camera for short is a camera that takes video or still photographs, or both, digitally by recording images via an electronic image sensor.
Many compact digital still cameras can record sound and moving video as well as still photographs. Most 21st century cameras are digital.
Digital cameras can do things film cameras cannot: displaying images on a screen immediately after they are recorded, storing thousands of images on a single small memory device, recording video with sound, and deleting images to free storage space.

Sensor
A sensor is a device that measures a physical quantity and converts it into a signal which can be read by an observer or by an instrument. For example, a mercury-in-glass thermometer converts the measured temperature into expansion and contraction of a liquid which can be read on a calibrated glass tube

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Microphone

A microphone is an acoustic-to-electric transducer or a sensor that converts sound into an electrical signal.
Microphones are used in many applications such as telephones, tape recorders, hearing aids and speech recognition.

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